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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29251917">Slizzard</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/chezchuckles/pseuds/chezchuckles'>chezchuckles</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Army Castle [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Castle (TV 2009)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Army Spy, F/M, don't forget she's messed up, kate gets drunk, not sure if this is really in order but here we go, so is he really</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 11:46:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>19,387</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29251917</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/chezchuckles/pseuds/chezchuckles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kate Beckett &amp; Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Army Castle [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945063</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>61</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Kate Beckett was slizzard.</p><p>(New word he’d just learned, from her actually, when she’d leaned into him and slid her hands to his crotch and squeezed, saying Baby, I’m slizzard, wanna fuck?)</p><p>The answer had been hell yes but also damn it no because while he’d never say no to her, never wanted to say no to her, they were still in public.</p><p>He was damn grateful that Royce had called him, though the phone call in the middle of the night had scared the shit out of him. He was used to Beckett getting home at all hours, used to the way she threw herself into her job; now that he’d been with her for three weeks, there was a comforting pattern to it.</p><p>She worked damn hard to get where she wanted to be, and it gave him the time to do what was necessary to maintain his agent status. Castle was a spy - not a codependent pussy. If Beckett wanted to come home at two in the morning from some undercover shit for Vice, he had things to do and missions to accomplish.</p><p>But that phone call from Royce. Fuck.</p><p>The Cubby Hole on Margarita Tuesday was a madhouse. And Beckett was right in the middle of the action. She had a drink in each hand and was grinding on the packed dance floor while Castle used his size to block the worst of the frat boys’ insistent bodies. </p><p>He’d followed her former training officer’s directions and showed up just in time to watch a fucking asshole in a backward-turned visor do a body shot off Beckett’s shining, quivering abs. </p><p>He’d nearly punched the frat boy in that damn pretty face, but instead, he’s shoved his way through the crowd and barked her name. (I’m not Officer Beckett right now, soldier. Wanna do a shot?)</p><p>When Castle had dragged her off the bar and tried to shove her towards the door, she’d told him to get the stick out of his ass.</p><p>So here he was, ass unsticked.</p><p>“We should fuck,” she called in his ear. Over the noise of the bass and the beat of careless bodies, Castle caught her hand as she reached for him again. “Come on, baby, at least push your fingers inside me.”</p><p>“Beckett,” he growled. There was no way she could hear him, not over this crowd, but she was seriously killing him. </p><p>He didn’t know what to do. Beckett didn’t get drunk. She barely even drank. He’d seen her sip at a glass of wine throughout dinner; she had gotten pleasantly buzzed in her bathtub while reading a book. But not this.</p><p>Not... slizzard.</p><p>Which he assumed meant so drunk she had forgotten her entire life.</p><p>Maybe that had been the point.</p><p>Castle wanted to get into it; he did. He wanted to lose himself in the grind of her ass against his groin and the feel of her body sinewy and lithe as she rubbed against him, but there was something about her desperate drinking that made everything hurt.</p><p>She finished off most of the lime drink in one hand and the glass was taken from her fingers by someone else in the crowd. She let it go with a cry but hooked her arm around his neck and hiked her leg against his hip, really dug her crotch into his thigh, moaning. She knocked back a gulp of strawberry margarita and lifted that arm around his neck so that he felt the frosty edge of the huge glass against his skin.</p><p>Castle wondered if he touched her - if he actually did it - would she be happy?</p><p>Would she finally be content to let him take her home?</p><p>He was getting desperate enough to try.</p><p>Castle slid his hands up her back and to her arms, behind his head now to relieve her of the drink. He passed it over to someone trying to rub against his side, and the flash of a smile and too much eye makeup disappeared with the glass.</p><p>Beckett had a couple of guys dancing close, touching her, which didn’t bother him as much as maybe it should, or would have, had he thought it was an issue. Everyone was touching out here, the floor was too crowded not to touch, and the rub of a breast, the wandering hands, the pulse of the beat was hypnotic enough to make it seem just fine.</p><p>One of the college guys tried to kiss her and Beckett jerked her elbow into his jaw; the kid grunted and fell away, pushed back into the crowd. Castle wasn’t worried about her, not like that; she was drunk but she still wanted only him.</p><p>Her arms hooked around his neck were squeezing tighter in rhythm to the music, and Castle really just wanted to ignore the whole crowd and sink down into her. But she was drunk.</p><p>She was drunk and Beckett was never drunk.</p><p>Royce had called him. I can’t do a thing to stop her and I’m not quite sober myself. I gotta go home and fucking sleep this off. Come scrape her ass off the dancefloor.</p><p>Like it had been an order.</p><p>He wished she’d tell him what happened. He wished Royce had stuck around long enough to explain.</p><p>Kate rolled her hips against his thigh and groaned at his ear, her breath hot and reeking of cheap tequila so that he could practically taste it. She was so fucking ready for it; she was driving him crazy with those sex-starved eyes and her drunk, fumbling fingers.</p><p>“Come on, baby,” she urged. Her words had long since slurred, running together with a heat that seared. She pushed her thumb along the length of him, outlining his cock against his pants, her hand between her own crotch and his. </p><p>He gritted his teeth and wrapped an arm at her back, gripped the nape of her neck so that his hand fisted her hair. She had to fucking stop. She had to. </p><p>She moaned and his cock surged.</p><p>“If you don’t stop,” he warned her, “I’m gonna unbutton your pants and push my fingers through your cunt, Beckett.”</p><p>“Then I won’t stop. Won’t ever stop. I always want you, can’t get enough of you. Touch me, you gotta touch me-”</p><p>Fuck, why was she such a chatty, sexy drunk?</p><p>“Beckett.”</p><p>“No,” she moaned into his ear. The sound of her voice carried right over the music and into his guts. “No. Call me Kate. Like you want me. Like you-”</p><p>“Fuck, I always want you. Can’t you feel that?” He didn’t know if she could hear him; she was rolling her body against his as if she could force out an orgasm. And maybe she could, maybe she already had. She had that look in her eyes she got deep into the night when they’d fucked over and over and she still wanted it.</p><p>“Touch me,” she breathed. “Touch me. I need you.”</p><p>He couldn’t keep resisting her. He couldn’t. It was killing him not to have her, claim her so that she didn’t feel the crowd or the drinks or whatever the hell she was running from.</p><p>So he slid a hand between them and pressed against the seam of her jeans, rolling his knuckles between her legs.</p><p>She cried out and came, her whole body squeezing his, her little chanting yes yes yes both amazing and heartbreaking at the same time.</p><p>-----</p><p>It wasn’t enough. She’d asked for it, and a dirty orgasm without even touching her wasn’t good enough.</p><p>If she was going to make him ache so badly he could barely move, he was going to get his hand in her pants. He was going to slip his fingers into her and soak up her wetness. One little orgasm? Not good enough.</p><p>Kate was humming and giggling against his neck, her hips still lazily rocking, but it took only a second to unbutton her jeans and yank the zipper down. She gasped like he’d electrocuted her, body stiffening, and he pushed his hand to her belly and down between her legs.</p><p>“Oh, fuck.” She groaned and sank her teeth into his neck.</p><p>“That’s right,” he growled, but there was no possible way she’d heard him. Her hips pushed into his hand and her jeans were so tight that all he could do was squirm his fingers down between the lips of her sex and pushed aside her folds.</p><p>“Fuck. Fuck,” she gasped. “God. Yes.”</p><p>“You fucking asked for it,” he snarled, closing his eyes to block out the bodies and the noise, the smell of alcohol and desperation. “You’re going to come for me, because I’m touching you. Not because you’re fucking drunk and horny.”</p><p>“Castle, please,” she moaned.</p><p>He rubbed against the swollen thickness of her clit and she clutched his neck, fingers digging into his back. Her body was strong - so strong - and she usually held herself in check when they started, but not now. Not drunk like this.</p><p>She moaned loudly and swiveled her hips, grinding into his hand, taking what she wanted from him. Her jeans were too tight for him to get far, do much, but the anger was throbbing in the force of his fingers and he crushed her clit against the bone of her pelvis.</p><p>Kate’s mouth opened at his neck on a noise that was both cry and sob, and he curled his fingers into her cunt around that bone and tugged her into him by that hook.</p><p>“Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chanted.</p><p>He wanted to crack her thighs wide open and plunge his cock into her; he wanted to punish her for a phone call in the middle of the night and thinking she’d been shot, she’d died, finally taken that bullet. He wanted to punish her for all of it.</p><p>All he had were his fingers tunneling into her and her body writhing against his, and he turned his mouth to her jaw and sucked.</p><p>He marked her there, where she couldn’t hide it, where the angle of her bone and skin meant the bruise would be impossible to cover well with make-up.</p><p>She screamed when she came. A noiseless scream, the opening of her mouth, the high-pitched noise that tailed up so that it didn’t even break free of her vocal cords. Her body pulsed around his fingers and she came up on her toes and her arms around him hanging on and fuck, she was beautiful. She was beautiful and so damn drunk and she still just wanted him.</p><p>He was soaked with her arousal.</p><p>“We’re going home,” he growled into her ear.</p><p>“Take me home,” she cried at his neck. “Take me home. I don’t want to be here any more. I can’t be here.”</p><p>God, she was going to cry before he could get her safe.</p><p>------</p><p>Getting someone home who was pathetically, desperately drunk should have been old habit by now.</p><p>It was. Actually. It was.</p><p>But he’d never had that someone be Beckett with how she would be draped over him one second and then jerking away the next, like she was warring with herself and unable to stop touching. He’d never had it be Kate who clutched his clothes, his arm, his shoulder, his hip like she needed closer, closer, closer.</p><p>She was crying already. Tears streaked down her cheeks and she didn’t seem to know it.</p><p>He hailed a cab and kept having to grab her by the upper arm, hold her there against him to keep her from wandering away. She seemed to have half an idea that she wanted back in the bar for one more drink, and he found himself with a handful of Beckett alternately using weak krav maga to untangle from him or rubbing against him with lascivious intent.</p><p>He didn’t really like either one.</p><p>His body responded, of course it did - she was Kate - but he didn’t like it. When a taxi finally stopped for them, he opened the back door and pushed her inside, folding her into the backseat as she still tried to walk away from him. The driver looked pissed, but Castle had cash up front and an address - and he wasn’t drunk himself. That seemed to help.</p><p>When the cab started forward, he glanced over at her to be sure she wasn’t going to be sick, but the Beckett family seemed better than that. They held their own. Jim, if a little weak-kneed and sad, never got sick either.</p><p>Kate was still crying. A tear slipped free and curved over her cheek to her chin, and she brushed her fingers against her neck but didn’t seem to realize. She turned to him with a mouth that slanted wickedly and her still-damp fingers came to his crotch, rubbing.</p><p>“Kate,” he sighed, catching her wrist. Of course she felt him respond to her, and she hooked her knee over his and pressed her body against his shoulder.</p><p>Her teeth nipped his ear, came back again for another bite. Harder, like she was punishing him for something. “You know you want me.”</p><p>“Always,” he growled, jerking his ear out of her teeth so he could see her face. Her eyes were dark pools, damp with grief. “But I’m taking you home instead.”</p><p>Her features collapsed. An inward thing, a breaking. He reached out and gripped her elbow, hooked another hand behind her neck and pulled her against him. But she wriggled away, put space between them, a foot or more now, the plastic of the backseat cold.</p><p>He watched her huddle against the side of the cab, her forehead to the glass, and her arm up so that her fingers could quickly swipe at tears.</p><p>God damn it.</p><p>“Beckett,” he husked. “Beckett, get over here.”</p><p>She ignored him and he reached across the backseat and gripped her upper arm, hauled her awkwardly back against him. It was a production of limbs and too-warm skin, her wet cheek colliding with his chin, her fist gripping his shirt.</p><p>She pushed away from him, but he wound his arm around her shoulders and held her hard against his side. She struggled still, and Castle could see the driver glancing at them in the rear view mirror, so he put his mouth to her ear and sucked lightly at her skin.</p><p>She went still with a rush of her breath, fingers twisting in his shirt.</p><p>“Whatever happened, whatever happens, you don’t have to doubt that I want you,” he rasped. “Don’t ever doubt it. I just don’t want to hate myself in the morning.”</p><p>She groaned and hid her face against his neck and now his skin was wet with her tears, her body still giving a token resistance, her fists crumpling his t-shirt.</p><p>“I already hate myself,” she husked.</p><p>“No, baby,” he murmured. “No.” He stroked the hair back from her face and she flinched, turned her head between the backseat and his shoulder. “Kate, love, don’t.”</p><p>Her body went slack against him, all of the sudden, like her strings had been cut.</p><p>He hesitantly cupped the side of her face, palmed the soft skin where her jaw met her cheek. She had passed out.</p><p>If she was like Jim, it wouldn’t be for long.</p><p>-----</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She woke violently about four blocks from her apartment building, her startled cry making both him and the driver jump. The car had come to a stop at a light, and the red in the darkness made strange beasts outside. She flailed away from him, smacked her face into the side of the door before he could catch her.</p><p>She had a knot forming at her cheek, tears in her eyes again, and Castle rapped on the plastic divider. “Let us out here. We’ll walk.” He was already pushing the cash through the slit in the plastic and grabbing Kate’s arm.</p><p>She didn’t stumble, but she seemed to be in shambles with every step. Her body wasn’t held together right; there was a looseness to her gait that told on her. She didn’t fall, didn’t sway, but he didn’t think she looked good.</p><p>He hadn’t wanted to carry her unconscious through the streets, but he also hadn’t wanted to lead a cab straight back to her door. So he was glad she was alert now, even if her walk looked painful.</p><p>He dug his fingers into his jeans pocket to fish out her keys, tried to take a mental stock of the situation. He felt like shit after this weekend, his father had given him two ‘light’ doses because he was on inactive field duty, and he hadn’t wanted to crash at the center. It was the only reason he’d been asleep when Royce had called, and he’d thrown on the first thing he could find - a ratty shirt of his she usually wore to bed and shoes shoved on without socks. </p><p>At her building, she listed to one side with her eyes fixed on the pavement as he unlocked the front door, and when she started forward, he could see sobriety leaking into her. She held the rail with a hand and took the stairs carefully, maneuvering each limb as if it was work and effort.</p><p>When he got her inside her apartment, she stood perfectly still in the entry, breathing slowly, her eyes closed, and he pushed past her to head for the bedroom. He yanked the shoes off his feet and tossed them towards the closet, his toes sweaty from going sockless and his heels rubbed raw. </p><p>Beckett hadn’t followed, so he turned back for her, found her still standing there. “Kate.”</p><p>She opened her eyes. “I need a drink.”<br/>“You need to sleep it off.”</p><p>“Fuck you,” she sighed. Like she’d meant to snarl at him but her energy had fallen apart in the middle of things. His frustration fizzled out and he reached for her wrist but she frowned, leaning away.</p><p>“Kate,” he said quietly. His head was pounding. He needed to sleep off the training from this weekend. “Don’t be that girl. The last thing you need is to end up like your dad.”</p><p>Her lips twisted as if she was going to ream him out, and he’d leave her standing here, he would, but instead her body canted into his like she couldn’t resist.</p><p>She couldn’t resist.</p><p>He knew that. Why was he fucking around with soft words and rational arguments and emotional blackmail?</p><p>She couldn’t resist.</p><p>He stepped into her body and skimmed his hands at her sides, started working at her pants to get his hand inside. She moaned and licked his jaw, oh yes, that, that’s it, and her body nudged into his, bumping and guiding and seeking. He used her momentum to get them turned towards her bedroom, her hands rucking his shirt up and her mouth open at his cheek.</p><p>“This is what I need,” she hummed.</p><p>“I got back earlier than I thought,” he said, stupidly. Like she’d remember this tomorrow, how he had tried to be there for her. </p><p>“You feel so good,” she moaned. “You taste so good.”</p><p>“Better than a damn fruity margarita.”</p><p>She giggled and it wasn’t right, wasn’t her, and he felt the heat at her cheek where the bruise was forming. He scooped her up in his arms and bypassed her indignation by dumping her right on the bed and coming straight in after her.</p><p>Her eyelids slid to half-mast, dark and exotic with the bruise highlighting the left. He sat up and yanked his shirt off over his head, pulled his pants down, batting away her hands as she tried to fumblingly help. She sighed and caressed his bare thigh, fingers close, too close.</p><p>Castle leaned in over her and peeled the jeans off her legs, got to her feet and had to yank off her heavy boots. She moaned and rose like a wave, undulating at his roughness, and he dumped everything over the side of the bed and came back to her.</p><p>She was breathing hard, eyes dizzied and unable to hold on his, and he laid himself out over her, his chin against her thigh and his hands reaching for her shirt. He unbuttoned her one by one, each little pearl thing a conquest, exposing her breasts first and then down to her belly.</p><p>The buttons at the bottom were already undone from where she’d yanked her shirt up to do body shots, and it made him furious now. He parted her shirt and unclasped her bra and opened his mouth over her belly button, sucked the remnants of cheap tequila from her skin. She tasted like salt and burn, lemon and alcohol.</p><p>He dragged his mouth up the rise of her abs and she moaned, breathy and insensible. He slid his arm under her neck and peeled the shirt from her body, untangled her bra from her arms even as she tried to wind herself around him.</p><p>“Wait, baby. My turn first,” he husked. She mewled and her hips bucked into him, already hot, but he knew what he was doing here, he knew just what to do to her.</p><p>With her panties on and her breasts warm against him, he angled them both under the covers. He pressed his arm between them and slipped his fingers between her legs, the dark and sacred heat blooming up her body and into her eyes as she stared up at him.</p><p>He was draped half over her, and she was struggling towards something he could give if only he could deceive her long enough.</p><p>His fingers worked soft circles between her legs, his breath skirting her cheek as he dusted light kisses over the bruise. She moaned once and her mouth fell open at his touch, her movements growing slower, her eyes heavy.</p><p>He stayed firmly on top of her, pinning her down to the mattress, and she let out a little cry and turned her face into his neck, her heart already thumping off-rhythm.</p><p>He eased a finger inside her and she clutched around the invasion, welcoming, needing, and in moments her walls fluttered and her body melted and her lips brushed a kiss into the dark space under his jaw.</p><p>She fell asleep still coming around his hand.</p><p>-----</p><p>Castle eased away from her, trying to keep from startling her awake. Her hair was snarled around her head and he took the risk of combing it down, but he only seemed able to make it more wild and unkempt.</p><p>Fuck, his hand was shaking. He felt shitty. The regimen was still thundering around in his blood stream. He needed a chance to just - recharge his batteries. Everything would be fine in the morning.</p><p>So long as they made it to the morning.</p><p>Her breathing was noisy on her back like she that, but he didn’t want to shift her in case she woke. Whatever had happened that had made Royce call him in the middle of the night, it would seem a hell of a lot better in the morning. He knew it had to have been bad, but after some sleep, it couldn’t be that bad.</p><p>Bad enough to get so drunk she was letting guys suck tequila out of her navel and grinding on the dancefloor with more moves than anyone that shit-faced should ever have. He loved her, but fuck, she couldn’t be doing this kind of thing. Her father...</p><p>Kate suddenly shuddered in her sleep and he came in close once more, keeping her warm, and she curled into up into him. Her arm hooked around his neck, she roused for a second as if coming awake, eyes flaring open, and then she was falling back into sleep.</p><p>Castle stayed still, just a moment more, afraid to even breathe lest he wake her. She needed to sleep. It would be better if she slept it off; she just needed to look at life with that rosy glow of morning.</p><p>He really couldn’t handle drunk Beckett. He didn’t know what to do, if what he’d done had been right at all, if giving her an orgasm to knock her out was exactly the right thing.</p><p>It felt deceitful. Felt a little too much like covert work, using her weaknesses against her. </p><p>Kate’s mouth fell open on a breath and she sighed, her body sinking into the mattress in sudden release. He was so tired, and it had been a long weekend at the training center, and he’d missed her.</p><p>Maybe she’d missed him too. Maybe that was part of this. He hadn’t been here when she’d needed him, but surely she knew it was a fluke, bad timing, nothing more?</p><p>He was here. He was here; she could count on him.</p><p>Why hadn’t she just called? Whatever had happened, she could have called him.</p><p>Castle lifted a finger and traced the edge of her cheekbone, dragging a strand of hair away from her lips. She was beautiful, but she stank like alcohol and the bar. Like her father.</p><p>Shit. She couldn’t do this. “What the hell, Beckett?”</p><p>Her mouth worked, smacking her lips, and that arm around his neck tightened.</p><p>“Okay,” he murmured, barely breathing. He dusted a kiss across that mouth - she tasted like cheap margaritas and faintly of smoke - and then he turned on his other side so that she was curled at his back.</p><p>That way if she lashed out in her sleep like she sometimes did, he could sleep through it.</p><p>He felt like shit. He just needed some sleep.</p><p>-----</p><p>Castle ran a hand through his wet hair, ducked his head as he looked himself over in the mirror. The training had always made a difference, but this past weekend’s seemed a hell of a lot more obvious.</p><p>For one thing, the bruises he’d had on his ribs from where her knees liked to dig into him during sex - gone. They’d been a couple weeks’ worth of constant battering, and yet even that yellow ring was completely healed.</p><p>He’d never really noticed that before. How quickly the injections seemed to build him back up. No wonder he slept like the dead for eight hours.</p><p>Castle had a sudden thought and he twisted his torso to glance at his back in the mirror.</p><p>It was gone. The thin scar she’d accidentally given him last week. And now that he looked, the deeper scars from knife wounds and bullets - those seemed less pronounced than they’d always been.</p><p>After 9/11, his father had said the regimen would be altered. But he had thought it was for the guys in the volunteer unit, that their program was different.</p><p>Looked like his was.</p><p>Huh.</p><p>Bruises gone, scars fading. He’d had an intense workout - cross-training and the thirteen mile run - and while last night he’d felt every second of the program, he didn’t now.</p><p>Everything was usually better in the morning, but this was a whole new fucking level.</p><p>He wondered if he should be more on top of this, like maybe he should know shit, actually listen when his father talked. But fuck. Surely if his father had said, Richard, this will speed up the healing process he’d have taken some note.</p><p>He had the urge to call Dr King. </p><p>Maybe he would. Maybe he would just ask...</p><p>In the meantime, he could smell the coffee brewing.</p><p>Castle grinned and reached for his t-shirt, pulling it from the towel bar. He skimmed it on over his head and pushed his arms through as he left her bathroom, moving through the hallway towards the kitchen.</p><p>She hadn’t woken yet; it was nearly seven on a Wednesday morning and she’d have to start her shift around three this afternoon. She was working the 3-10 Charlie shift, and he knew she hated it, but she’d been assigned to Vice.</p><p>Only a matter of time before she was a detective. He’d been familiarizing himself with her mother’s case, getting a feeling for the awful details, trying to inure himself to the too-real grief he saw in her broken eyes.</p><p>It was impossible. He was going to end up ripping his own guts out for her.</p><p>He’d never done that before. It was... different. It was a strange feeling, having the knife in his guts and wondering when it was going to stop twisting. She knotted him up; she scrambled him. And he knew it didn’t sound great, but it was.</p><p>It was great. She was doing things to him. She was opening him up to more than just strawberry shortcake and milkshakes for dinner. She was breaking open the world and showing him impossible things.</p><p>Fuck, he sounded like a fucking dork. She was turning him into a dork.</p><p>Castle finished making her coffee and headed back for the bedroom, shaking his head at himself. He loved her, yeah, but hell. </p><p>He didn’t even have it in him to stop. He knew his old life was untenable now, but he didn’t have the strength or will to alter his course.</p><p>He headed straight for Kate and hoped sleep had done wonders for her.</p><p>-----</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“It’s morning, baby,” he murmured, holding her coffee close to him. He pressed his fist into the mattress and leaned over her, kissed her closed eyelid. “Time to wake up, sweetheart.”</p><p>Kate’s nose scrunched and she turned her head, but her body was no longer sprawled and loose. She curled on her side and hid her face, groaned into the pillow.</p><p>“Kate, how’s-”</p><p>“Shut the fuck up,” she moaned.</p><p>He shut up.</p><p>Kate drew her knees up under her and wrapped her arms around her head and he wondered if maybe it was really bad. Could she have alcohol poisoning? He’d never gotten plastered like that before. He just didn’t, though he assumed at some point if he knocked back enough vodka shots, he’d get there. </p><p>Mikey had challenged him once and in a fit of fucking frustrated arrogance, Castle had drunk the asshole under the table. It had taken thirty-two shots in two hours.</p><p>Mikey had been the reigning champion.</p><p>When his head had smacked into the corner of the table on his way down, Castle hadn’t even felt sluggish. He’d acted the part though, pretended he was unable to carry Mikey out of there, had to lead a couple of surly guys back to their shared bachelor pad holding up both him and Mikey.</p><p>“Kate?”</p><p>She moaned and slowly pushed up on her hands, hair hanging lank around her face, and then on her knees, rocking back in the bed.</p><p>Uh. This was... weird.</p><p>“Baby, what the hell are you-”</p><p>“Oh, God,” she moaned, collapsing back into the bed. She buried her face in the pillow, still not looking at him, and curled up in a ball. He set her mug of coffee on the bedside table, lowered himself to one elbow to comb the hair behind her ear.</p><p>“Beckett?” he murmured. “Kate, sweetheart, what do you need?”</p><p>She twisted her head and opened one eye, wincing at him. “You could-” she rasped, closed her eyes to swallow painfully. She licked her lips, tried again. “Could start spinning the earth, round the other way, make yesterday not happen.”</p><p>Castle gave a relieved chuckle, leaned in to kiss her temple. “Like Superman. That bad, huh?”</p><p>“Fuck,” she moaned, but she dragged out the word like it hurt her too.</p><p>“It’s seven, if you wanted to shower.” He used two fingers to stroke the hair back from her face and she kneed her way closer to him, closing her eyes. “Kate?”</p><p>Her body stiffened and he realized that only now was she actually waking up. Or like only now she remembered why.</p><p>“Kate, I can-”</p><p>Beckett curled up on her side, her back to him, her forearm over her eyes. “No. Go - go away. God. Castle, just leave me alone.”</p><p>“Hey, love, you should really-”<br/>She growled and pulled the pillow over her head.</p><p>“I have coffee for you.”</p><p>The pillow came down, an eye opened. Castle leaned in over her to see her face and she rolled slowly to her back, watching him, suspicious.</p><p>“On the bedside table,” he promised.</p><p>Her lips turned down instead of up; her mouth twisted and a choked sob came out. In his moment of stunned horror, Kate clapped a hand over her eyes and tried to flee from the bed.</p><p>Castle jerked towards her, snagged her wrist before she could get out of bed. But it didn’t matter because she was falling over her own limbs, the sheets tangling her up. It gave him the chance to drag her back into bed and wrap himself around her, restraining her.</p><p>“Castle,” she moaned.</p><p>“You’re scaring me. What happened. What happened that you had to-”</p><p>She turned into him, faster than he’d hoped, her arm snaking around his neck, another noise in her throat. “He got - my dad. My dad was arrested.”</p><p>“Oh, fuck,” he whispered, arms tightening around her. </p><p>Kate groaned and ripped out of his embrace, pushed off the bed only to fall to her knees on the bedroom floor. Before he could reach her, she was jerking away and down the hall to the bathroom, fleeing from him.</p><p>Castle stood alone in the room until he heard the shower cut on.</p><p>He gathered her coffee mug and walked slowly towards the bathroom door. He leaned his shoulder against the wall and listened, closing his eyes.</p><p>She was crying.</p><p>He sank down to the floor, cradling her coffee mug in his hands, and waited for it to end.</p><p>-----</p><p>When the fog cleared, Kate Beckett stood in the entry to the living room in only clean pink panties and a white tank top. He could see her black bra beneath it where a strap was slipping down her shoulder and the cups were faint shadows over her breasts.</p><p>She was cradling her coffee, hair in a wet rope over her shoulder and staining her tank. She wasn’t smiling but she wasn’t crying either. All traces of tears were gone.</p><p>He lifted the handle of the pan on the stove, showed her the scrambled eggs. “Want some?”</p><p>She made a noise that could go either way and stepped into the living room, moving slowly for the kitchen. </p><p>“You need anything? I looked up a hangover online and-”</p><p>“Shh,” she murmured, closing her eyes a moment. He watched her sway there and then sit down heavily at the dining room table.</p><p>Silence. Okay. Nothing new for Beckett.</p><p>He dished up a plate of scrambled eggs, added a couple slices of toast he’d already made for himself, and he brought the plate to the dining room table. He left it close but not too close, thinking maybe the smell might be bad, and then he went back and pushed two more slices of bread into the toaster and began eating his own eggs out of the pan.</p><p>She hadn’t lifted her head from the cradle of her hands. </p><p>He didn’t mind. They didn’t often do a whole lot of talking unless he was the one in the mood for it; she wasn’t a chatty person. And the hangover must be bad, though the fact that she was upright and showered seemed to be a feat.</p><p>His toast popped up and he picked them out with two fingers, laid the slices on the counter. He found butter and her cinnamon and sugar, concocted an elaborately spiced cinnamon toast. </p><p>She’d taught him that.</p><p>Oh, maybe Kate could be enticed with cinnamon toast?</p><p>Castle found a plate and arranged the toast, then he came back to the dining room table and sat down beside her. He set the plate right by her elbow and stole the bare bread - now cooling - from her scrambled eggs, ate that himself while he sat with her.</p><p>She shifted slightly and one of her hands came down, touched the rim of the plate. “My mom used to make me cinnamon toast when I was sick.”</p><p>“I guess not when you were hungover?” he said, smiling at her.</p><p>She actually laughed, moaned into the tail end of her amusement, leaning hard into one hand and closing her eyes again.</p><p>Castle draped an arm at the back of her chair, brushed his fingers over the leading edge of her shoulder. “You made me cinnamon toast when I got back that first time.”</p><p>She put her chin in her hand and looked at him. “You were bruised. Beat up.”</p><p>“I like cinnamon toast. So I made it for you.”</p><p>She seemed to be trying to smile at him, but weariness had crept into her eyes and her lips twisted. “Sometimes, Rick, you’re like a big kid. I don’t know how you do that. You’ve seen, done... even after Brighton Beach, you were still smiling at me like-”</p><p>“A kid?” he frowned.</p><p>“A nine year old,” she said, and now her lips allowed a smirk. “You can be very eager.”</p><p>“Yeah, in bed,” he muttered. “Being compared to a nine year old doesn’t exactly-”<br/>“What is making me cinnamon toast?” she said, chuckling now. “And that awful omelet back in the beginning?” She was rubbing her temple with two fingers, her eyes kept shying away from the light, but she was easier than she’d been.</p><p>She wasn’t crying. She might even be smiling at him.</p><p>“Making you cinnamon toast is... okay, it’s my pathetic, nine year old self’s attempt to make you happy.”</p><p>She sucked in a breath and her eyes slammed shut. </p><p>Too much.</p><p>Fuck.</p><p>“The happier you are,” he said glibly, still trying, “the more I get laid. So if I gotta master breakfast foods to take you back to bed until you absolutely have to get dressed for work, then I will gladly do it.”</p><p>Her eyes didn’t open but some of that rigidity had left her spine. He brushed his fingertips across the sharp wing of her shoulder blade, waiting.</p><p>When she opened her eyes, though, she looked so tired of it. She looked tired of him. </p><p>But they were her rules; he was only parroting back the deceit and lies she needed to keep herself blinded to the truth.</p><p>He loved her. She loved him too. This was serious. </p><p>But yeah, he was tired of it too.<br/>Castle leaned in and softly touched his lips to her cheek. “And if cinnamon toast and my childish eagerness at all make you feel better, then at least I can take care of you. I just want to take care of you, Kate. Be good for you.”</p><p>He hovered there a moment, not able to breathe, caught in how stupid it had been to open his mouth like that, to tell her the bald and glaring truth, but she didn’t move away.</p><p>When he pulled back to breathe, he saw tears slipping out from under her closed lids, and he couldn’t do it anymore.</p><p>Castle wrapped her in his arms and dragged her out of her chair and into his lap, cradled her against him.</p><p>-----</p><p>When Beckett wound her arms around him and hung on, everything in his heart just broke for her.</p><p>“Oh, baby,” he murmured, holding her harder. “It’s going to be okay. Whatever happened. It’s okay. We can make it okay.”</p><p>She didn’t sob; she didn’t weep. He wasn’t sure she could let herself do either of those, but he felt her tears leaking from her in a river she wasn’t able to control, drenching his skin and t-shirt both. She kept swiping her fingers against her cheeks and his neck, trying to get rid of the evidence, taking these deep, shuddering breaths every time she lifted her head to pull away.</p><p>But she never pulled away. She only crashed back against him and buried her face in the hollow of his throat.</p><p>It felt like more than just her father getting arrested. They’d talked about it between them before, the consequences of her father’s drinking, although an arrest hadn’t seemed likely since he didn’t own a car. But they’d worked out all the scenarios; she should have been prepared for something big.</p><p>But this had to be more.</p><p>He wondered if she’d cried since her mother’s funeral. If she’d cried at all. Was this the last five years worth of grief breaching the damn?</p><p>He didn’t try to hold on to her too tightly. He didn’t palm the back of her neck like he wanted to and press her down against him; he knew better than that at least. He kept one hand behind her knees to help her balance across his spread thighs and one hand on her back, rubbing her spine up and down beneath her tank top.</p><p>After too long, she turned her face away from his neck and laid her cheek on top of his shoulder. He couldn’t see her now, but he felt her swiping at tear tracks on her face with her hand. He tilted his head to the back of hers, nuzzling his nose down into her wet hair, filled his lungs with the honey and flower scent of her conditioner.</p><p>He was surprised she’d stayed this long. Surprised and honored, and while it was heartbreaking to see Kate Beckett cry, it was also healing something cracked in him, something that had needed her to need him, if only once.</p><p>She shifted now and pushed off his shoulders, unfolded her body from his lap so she could stand on her own two feet. She wasn’t looking at him, just swiping her thumbs under her eyes and wiping the moisture off on the tops of her bare thighs. He turned in his chair to bracket her legs with his knees, framed her hips with his hands.</p><p>“So he was arrested?”</p><p>She nodded, still looking over his shoulder. He didn’t try to stand and face her, didn’t need the level ground. She needed to be higher and taller and in control, and he could play the supplicant, smoothing his thumbs over her hipbones in pleasant distraction.</p><p>She shivered and dropped her hands to his wrists but she didn’t stop him.</p><p>“There aren’t public intoxication laws in New York,” he said softly. “What was he arrested for?”</p><p>“Disorderly conduct,” she said, her forehead deepening into a frown that was one twist away from grief.</p><p>“What did he do?”</p><p>“He got in a fight,” she whispered, catching her bottom lip with her teeth. </p><p>Castle groaned and leaned into her, his forehead pressed into her stomach. “Shit.”</p><p>“With the bar owner. That place in Harlem. The owner called the cops. He was put in the Zoo, and no one told me.”</p><p>Castle jerked his head up and stared at her. “No one - why didn’t they tell you?”</p><p>“I think, from what I could figure out, that’s what the fight was about? Not calling me.”</p><p>Because Castle had been gone. Because Jim had known that Kate was alone and he’d been drunk enough - or sober enough - to think his daughter shouldn’t have to come get him.</p><p>“How did he convince the arresting officer to not tell you either?”</p><p>“I’m not sure he knew. The report was filed by an undercover officer - which isn’t supposed to happen, and so they blacked out his name on the file - and I couldn’t get anywhere with anyone about making it all just... disappear.”</p><p>“Disappear?”</p><p>“He can’t have a charge against him,” Kate said tightly. “He’ll get disbarred. If he can’t work, Castle, it... he won’t make it. Work is the only thing that keeps him together at all.”</p><p>“Like father, like daughter,” he murmured. She cut a look to him for it, but she didn’t deny it. “Okay, so we’ll spend today tracking down the officer who filed the report and we’ll get the charges dropped.”</p><p>She shook her head. “It’s covered. I found the guy’s CO and we talked and I... fuck, Castle. I burned a lot of bridges last night trying to get my damn father off the hook, and you know what the worst part is? All I’m doing is enabling him. The CO just looked at me like a complete... complete girl the whole time.”</p><p>“Girl?”</p><p>“You know. It’s the same look the guys have when we go to a domestic disturbance call and it’s the same address from last month and it’s the same woman denying that her boyfriend beat on her.”</p><p>“Pity.”</p><p>“Disgust,” she sighed, sinking down now into her own chair. </p><p>“But not you,” he said softly. “You’d never pity them. Or be disgusted. I know you. Like that boy and his father when the mom went crazy. He shot you and you didn’t even report it because the boy needed at least one parent.”</p><p>Kate shifted her eyes to him.</p><p>“So it’s taken care of?” he asked her, trying to push through that moment of honesty. “Charges were dropped and he won’t get disbarred.”</p><p>“Yeah.” She rubbed two fingers against the lifeline on her palm. “For all the good it does. Maybe I should’ve let him twist for it.”</p><p>He didn’t know what she should do; it was her father, a man who had at one point been a good father. A great father. Kate had told him stories of family vacations and her first semester at college, boyfriends and motorcycles. Jim - when he was sober - was still that same laidback, easygoing man, but he lacked all the humor and confidence he used to have.</p><p>Castle wondered if that could ever be gotten back. If he went through treatment - if he admitted the problem and made that change - Castle wasn’t sure that Beckett could get past the last few years’ of failing and disappointment and betrayal.</p><p>Her father had abandoned her for his grief. He couldn’t see how that would ever be forgotten.</p><p>“Enough of this,” she scraped out, shaking her head. “I fucked up. I was angry and I...”</p><p>She rubbed at her palm again, and Castle waited, unsure where this was going, what she might say about last night.</p><p>“It won’t happen again, Rick.” She lifted her head and her jaw worked, eyes not quite meeting his. “I know he says that to both of us all the time. But I mean it. It won’t.”</p><p>Oh, God. She thought she had to be accountable to him? He wasn’t-</p><p>Oh. Oh, she was accountable to him. Because he loved her. Because somewhere under the layers of deception and misdirection, she really did know.</p><p>And she wouldn’t be making him promises unless she loved him too.</p><p>He nodded solemnly and took both of her hands in his, brought her fingers up to his mouth to kiss the lingering salt on her skin.</p><p>“You’re allowed to be hurt because of him. You’re allowed to blow off steam or want a night of no consequences. But next time, Kate, just call me.”</p><p>She flipped her hands out of his grip and coasted her palms down his shoulders, got out of her chair and straddled his lap, her bare thighs rubbing against his jeans.</p><p>Kate leaned in and nipped his ear. “You’re right. You are a much better night of no consequences and blowing off steam. Don’t know why I forgot that.”</p><p>And then she slid her hand down his chest and began unbuttoning his pants.</p><p>-----</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Kate,” he breathed. His hands trembled as he touched her face, trying not to encourage it. “Kate, you...”</p><p>“Me,” she agreed. She softened her touch against his hips, found the skin at his waist, moving slowly. “Me.”<br/>“You just...”</p><p>“Had a terrible night,” she murmured. She leaned in and kissed him, lips to lips, touching her tongue along the seam of his mouth. Distracted by the taste of her, he missed the moment she found him until her fingers traced his cock.</p><p>“Kate,” he gasped.</p><p>She slid her hands around to his ass and tugged; his hips came up involuntarily, and she pushed his pants down, slid off his lap to pull them the rest of the way.</p><p>He leaned forward for her, caught her hair in his hands as he cupped her face. “No.”</p><p>She was working his pants off his bare feet, and she ducked her head from his clasp, kissed the inside of his knee. Castle gripped her shoulder but she leaned her cheek against his knee and skimmed her fingers along his calf.</p><p>His cock tightened and pulsed with life, his arousal like a fist around his spine. </p><p>Kate kissed his knee, licked the crease where his leg was bent and then dragged her tongue up his inside thigh.</p><p>“Fuck,” he gasped.</p><p>On her knees, she cradled his hips in her hands and kissed him, the side of his shaft as his cock pulsed near her cheek.</p><p>“No,” he garbled.</p><p>“Stop telling me no,” she whispered and then sucked on his shaft.</p><p>He gripped her hair and found the soft shell of her ear, used his thumb to tilt her chin up to him. “No. Not this. I want inside you.”</p><p>She smiled at him and lifted up, fingers trailing along his thighs. “Mm, like that much better.”</p><p>She held out her hand and wriggled her fingers and he stood, taking off his shirt as he did, flinging it away. Kate tucked her hand under the hem of her tank, but he knocked it away, splayed his fingers there at her skin, circling her belly button.</p><p>Her eyes were heavy on his. And she caught him by the wrist, blinking hard, but he didn’t want to rush this. He wanted to be sure of her, of her willingness not just in body but her heart. He wanted her heart.</p><p>Castle skimmed his hands over her hips and pulled the tank top off. Her hair fell around her face and her mouth was open, lips pink and her tongue touching her teeth. He leaned in and kissed her, the same kiss she’d given him, lips to lips, brushing and touching and teasing.</p><p>Kate hummed and the vibration of her sounds against his mouth made him clutch her, a little too hard, a little too needy. She smiled and her hands found his cock again, stroking. He grunted and gripped her hips, started walking her back towards the bedroom.</p><p>They made fast work of the hallway, her hands too clever and her mouth skimming his neck, his chest, tugging him forward even as she went backward, trusting him to guide her away from walls and doors and furniture.</p><p>He gave up trying to appreciate the show and simply crushed her against him, scooped her up, and carried her through to the bedroom. Kate didn’t complain, but she hooked her leg around his hip and kept him close, so close that when he lowered her to the bed, he couldn’t lift up again.</p><p>He didn’t mind at all. She was hot and beautiful and looking at him like she wanted nothing else for always.</p><p>“Hey there, beautiful,” he smiled down at her. The ring of her hair made a halo on the pillow, the sheets remembered the press of her body and conformed to it, caressing her.</p><p>He pushed his hips down into hers and she arched to meet him, her eyes seeking his. He wanted slow and good; he wanted to adore her. </p><p>The way she was rubbing herself against him was gong to make that impossible.</p><p>“Kate,” he growled, gritting his teeth at the edge of it. “Kate, love, let me - let me get you ready.”</p><p>“I’m ready,” she grinned, opening her thighs to take him. He could feel her arousal already, the wet of her need for him, her want, and he slipped his fingers between her legs.</p><p>Kate mewled.</p><p>He kissed that open mouth and circled his tongue along hers. She gripped him with her fingers, hard points against his shoulders, clutching now at his spine, his ass, grinding her body up into his hand.</p><p>She was so wet, so hotly wet, and he stroked his fingers inside her.</p><p>Kate cried out and came apart, vibrating under him, her noises caught in his mouth. He slid out his fingers and coated himself with her arousal, and then he pushed up inside her.</p><p>She moaned and held on to him, arms banded across his back, legs drawn up to hold him. He moved slowly, nudged deeper, and Kate arched so that their bellies touched.</p><p>He clasped her back and pressed her into him, and his cock pulsed inside her. He was so close, already so close, and she was panting against his cheek, calling to him.</p><p>Castle sped up, rocking into her, his hips thrusting to put himself deep, and she met him, she met him, her body strong and supple and welcoming. The heat of her clutched his cock and milked him, her arms shifted and suddenly her fingers were in his hair, at his ears, her mouth open and kissing him.</p><p>The intensity of her need for him swept him away, shattering his control so that he plunged inside her, fiercer and fiercer, needing her so much, needing her to always need him like this, just like this.</p><p>Never again would he be where she couldn’t have him, where she couldn’t get to him when she needed him. </p><p>He opened his mouth and breathed the words he couldn’t say right into the sound of her moans. She cried out and her sex clutched him, a deep fist, and he came apart inside her, working his climax until the end.</p><p>He dropped against her side and her arm curled at his neck, stroked his ear. Before he could move or breathe, she was turning into him and wrapping her body around his, her face against his neck for shelter.</p><p>-----</p><p>Kate spread her fingers along his ribs, watched the way his skin rippled at her touch. Her head was killing her and her mouth was dry, but her body refused to work to move away. She stayed just where she was, pressed chest to chest with Castle, and she didn’t think about why.</p><p>There was always a moment right after where he couldn’t seem to come back together, where he couldn’t watch her, couldn’t study her every movement and divine her thoughts. </p><p>It made her want him. To control him, to have him, for him to reach for her and take her because he was without the ability to keep himself back. She had to stifle the urge to drag her hand down to his and put his fingers between her legs and wake him up a little, make her headache disappear with the hard beat of pleasure.</p><p>She wanted him, but she loved the moment more. </p><p>Loved... the ripple of his skin like this, the heavy weight of him as he leaned for her, his arm tightening around her waist and his chin digging into her jaw as he nuzzled close. A wild thing tamed, a faithful spy.</p><p>He needed her. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t interested in fooling herself about the reality of things. She knew the truth, and she would have the truth no matter how difficult. He needed her. His need of her was a powerful thing.</p><p>She ought to be more careful with him. Of him. She held him in her hands, and just as his skin rippled to her touch, just as his cock firmed for her, so did she have all of him.</p><p>She was trying. She was actually trying, and last night she’d fucked up and been afraid and she had needed-</p><p>She had wanted him there. </p><p>Kate curled her fingers at his ribs and skimmed up to his arm, clung to his bicep. She pushed a kiss to the skin at his muscle, allowing the truth of that to sink into her. </p><p>She had wanted his help. Or just him, at her side, even if he could have done nothing at all to help. Not for sex, not because she had power over him, but for him. For his hand around hers and his insistence on her, for his calmness in the heat of things, for the certainty he had.</p><p>She needed to be careful. Oh, God, she had to be careful.</p><p>But in this moment, she didn’t have to be careful at all. She could be whatever damaged, inchoate thing she was, hungover and terrified and rageful... or she could be soft and curled against him, tamed and faithful.</p><p>She could be to him whatever it was she had to give, to take, and that was enough.</p><p>Just in this moment.</p><p>-----</p><p>She was quiet. </p><p>Too quiet.</p><p>Beckett was either angling for more or sliding out of bed to get moving, and this quiet, resting thing wasn’t really like her.</p><p>He kept his eyes closed to keep from scaring her into leaving the bed, realizing she’d been basking.</p><p>Basking.</p><p>That’s what it was. She was basking in it, enjoying it. Him. She was letting herself soak in the pleasure. True, she had some time before she had to get to work, but that had never stopped her before.</p><p>He was afraid to move. But he really wanted to look at her, see her face as she rested with him, and even if that broke the spell, he’d know.</p><p>He’d know what Kate Beckett looked like when she was completely and finally at ease. When she was still.</p><p>He opened his eyes and she was watching him. </p><p>Kate smiled, a shy thing, surprising as a butterfly in snow, and he couldn’t help touching her lips with two fingers, stunned by her. That smile didn’t falter. She slid forward, even closer, and he curled his hand around her neck, playing with her hair as he stared at her.</p><p>Had she ever been so close? Allowed him so much?</p><p>He nudged his knee between her thighs and pressed it to the mattress, shifting into her. Kate wound her arm around his between them and never stopped smiling at him.</p><p>“I’m sorry I was passed out at the training center instead of here with you last night.”</p><p>“Me too,” she said softly. She swallowed and closed her eyes a moment, but even that didn’t keep her down for long. Her gaze came back to him, lips flirting with another smile. “I missed you.”</p><p>His heart flipped, eyes stinging. “Missed you too, love.”</p><p>She smiled again, her lashes catching whatever it was she was blinking back, and she surged into him, her arm hooking around his neck. “I have you now,” she whispered. “That’s all I need.”</p><p>He cradled her against him, suddenly aware of her breasts against his chest and her sex riding his thigh, aware of her body and how his own craved her. He skimmed his hand down her back and cupped her ass, shifting her higher.</p><p>She moaned and her teeth caught his earlobe; her hand traveled down and tried to come between them.</p><p>“Just you,” he murmured, snaking his fingers between hers and drawing her grasp to the slide of their thighs. “I want to touch you.”</p><p>“Then touch me,” she commanded.</p><p>He let go of her hand and gripped the back of her knee, drew her sex against the hard ridge of his flexed thigh. She moaned, lazy and arching from her throat, and he kissed her neck, traveling down to touch his tongue to her breast.</p><p>“Oh,” she gasped. “You have the best ideas.”</p><p>-----</p><p>He went easy on her, though maybe it was torture going slow and careful. He kept her on her side so he could feel her writhe against him, her thighs parted over his leg, head tossed back. Like this, her breasts fell towards the mattress, her nipples close together, and he sucked on them both, flicked the sharp points against his teeth.</p><p>Kate moaned and rode his thigh, and he circled her body with his arm to tease her ass. Feasting on her breasts, touching her between her legs, the hot grip of her hands on his shoulders were making him crazy, wild with it.</p><p>She was so responsive. She moved so well, wanted so much, took everything he gave.</p><p>He moved away from her sex to smear arousal over the curve of her ass and up to the bear inked on her hip. She gasped, arching into him, and he finally pushed her back to the mattress.</p><p>Kate’s hair spilled around her and her eyes opened, staring up at him. “Please make me come,” she rasped. She looked like she could cry if he didn’t, wouldn’t touch her.</p><p>Castle settled against her side and skimmed his hand down her sternum, over her belly, to the mound between her legs. The hair was kinked and damp from sex, and he loved the humid feel of her cunt waiting for him, seeking him.</p><p>He scratched his fingers through it, combing it like he sometimes did the hair draped at her shoulders, smoothing and straightening and sensitizing her skin. She shifted restlessly, half under him, and he lowered his mouth to her breasts.</p><p>She cried out, clutching his ears, and he circled his tongue over her nipple. Biting softly, biting hard, letting his teeth scrape over the so-soft skin of her breasts. He rubbed his jaw against the slope, inhaled the scent of them still clinging to her body, and then he wrapped his fingers around her thigh and moved down.</p><p>“Oh,” she cried. “Castle. Rick.”</p><p>“I love... your taste,” he hummed, letting himself pause long enough to flirt with the truth. He touched his mouth to her belly and she bucked; he had to clamp down on her thigh to hold her.</p><p>“Rick, please,” she begged. “Don’t stop.”</p><p>“Tell me what you want, Kate.”</p><p>“You!”</p><p>He couldn’t believe she’d said it. Not like that, not so quickly, like her need for him was right there at the surface, like it was so deep inside her that it was the only thing she could possibly say.</p><p>Her eyes flashed open and her thighs flexed, trying to get at him. She propped herself up on an elbow and reached down for him, fingers caressing his neck and then his cheek. There was love in her eyes, aching and wide, and he kissed the soft touch of her fingers, overwhelmed.</p><p>Her fingers flipped and pushed on his forehead, nudging him down, and he flashed her a grin.</p><p>And then he went down on her.</p><p>-----</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Kate begged.</p><p>It was delicious, it was inflaming, the sound of her broken voice, hoarse with her cries, as she bucked and twisted under his mouth. He was ruthless with it, sucking her clit and spearing her with his tongue, ravaging her cunt.</p><p>She’d had a few orgasms now and there was an artistry to it, a layering of sensations needed to bring her already wracked body to the work of climax again. </p><p>For Beckett, rough and insistent pushed her hard and fast to the edge every time, but it required consistent denial and persistent touch. He backed away from her and she groaned, panting, body heaving, slick with sweat.</p><p>He licked her inside thigh and felt her tremble, her nerves raw to it. She was so close, she was trying too hard, so he gentled her, helped her deceive herself into her orgasm.</p><p>Skimming a hand up her ribs, he laid his cheek against her inside thigh, watched her gulp down air and release the sheets from her fists. He cupped her breast, rubbed her nipple, and she groaned, her own hand lifting to press over her eyes.</p><p>Castle dipped his mouth to her cunt and sucked.</p><p>Kate shouted and burst apart under his tongue, keening as he worked her orgasm through its death throes. He twisted her nipple in his fingers and she came up around his head, clutching his shoulders as her hips bucked wildly under him.</p><p>She was coming again, just like that, one climax rolling over into the next. He hadn’t expected that, but fuck, she tasted rich and sweet and desperate on his tongue. </p><p>“You have to stop,” she gasped. “I can’t, can’t - oh, God, you have to stop.”</p><p>He did, not pushing her, not now that she was hungover and a little wrecked with everything. He caught her shoulders with an arm and crawled up over her, lowering her back to the bed as she pressed her legs together, her eyes squeezed shut.</p><p>Castle kissed her chin and down her jaw, french kissed her ear until she laughed. It was a weak sound, but it was there, and he let himself slide into bed behind her, their bodies spooning.</p><p>“You’re gonna give me an ego so big my head won’t fit through the door,” he whispered, nudging his nose into the back of her neck.</p><p>“What?” she scraped out. Her knees drew up and he fit his behind hers.</p><p>“Back to back like that, wow.”</p><p>She groaned and slapped at his hand; he stopped teasing her skin with his touch and simply tugged her back into his chest. Her thighs were firmly shut, even against his knee. She usually liked that.</p><p>“Too much?” he asked softly.</p><p>“Never.”</p><p>Well, that couldn’t be true, not in real life. They bruised each other, and while recently their bruises had matched, they didn’t any longer. She still had marks on her hips and her spine, the back of her neck from the door and the base of her coccyx from the floor, and his were gone.</p><p>Healed by his usual training.</p><p>But not hers. He had to remember that because she wasn’t going to stop him. Ever.</p><p>“You’re thinking too much,” she rasped. Her voice was completely cracked and she cleared her throat, but it didn’t work. “You know I love it. You know I can handle it.”</p><p>“You told me to stop.”</p><p>She sighed and caught his fingers, tugged his arm up between her breasts. “Just a little... raw this morning. After last night.”</p><p>He kissed her shoulder blade, laid his cheek against her back, his lashes brushing her skin.<br/>“Never made you come twice with just my mouth on you.”</p><p>She laughed, a little breathless. “Exactly.”</p><p>“It was hot.”</p><p>Kate eased back into his chest and he tucked his chin at her neck, blew a breath into her ear. She wriggled at the sensation but her thighs loosened and he nudged his knee between her legs.</p><p>Kate sighed, stroking her fingers along his forearm. “You know I tell you what I want, take what I want, but you always seem to know what I need. So trust your instincts, Castle. You’ve never been wrong.”</p><p>Even bruised. Even raw.</p><p>He shifted forward and kissed the corner of her mouth, wondered if she’d stay in bed with him until she had to leave for work.</p><p>Wondered if she would stay in bed even if he didn’t use his fingers and his mouth and his cock to keep her here.</p><p>His instincts were telling him she needed to be held, not fucked.</p><p>-----</p><p> </p><p>-----</p><p> </p><p>-----</p><p>It was one of those rare Friday mornings where Kate Beckett wasn’t on shift - she had Saturday and Sunday both this weekend - but Rick Castle was going in to work.</p><p>Like a normal man who worked at an office.</p><p>Like this man who’d basically been living with her these last three months had been on some kind of sabbatical and now he was taking up his position once more. A professor of history, or English, ready to open bright young minds.</p><p>She had no idea. He was the one with the cover IDs. </p><p>Since he was also the one who’d been ruthless about her getting to work on time, she was returning the favor, sliding up behind him at the bathroom sink and slipping her hands inside his boxer briefs.</p><p>Castle grunted, his right eye with a little tic, and she stroked the soft skin around his shaft until he was hard.</p><p>“Beckett,” he growled, gripping the comb in one hand and pressing his fists into the edge of the sink.</p><p>“Yeah, baby?”</p><p>“I have to...”</p><p>“Just once?”</p><p>He groaned and turned around, his hands going for her t-shirt and pulling it off over her head. The comb was lost, she was running her fingers through his hair and destroying it anyway, and Castle spun her around and hoisted her up on the edge of the sink.</p><p>She gasped as the cold porcelain met her bare ass, but Castle was already spreading her thighs and stepping between her knees, angling for her. Kate leaned back, gripped the edge of the sink, and lifted her hips a little for him.</p><p>Castle pushed inside her without hesitating, and she moaned, her eyes closing on the wonderful feel of him. Widening her, spreading her, buried deep. Castle leaned in and opened his mouth on her breast, rubbed her nipple with his tongue. Kate cried out at the sensation, and he rocked his hips into hers.</p><p>She arched to meet him, her pulse sky-rocketing, her head against the mirror, and Castle drove harder into her. </p><p>“Fuck, you feel so good.”</p><p>She hooked her leg around his waist, her heel digging into his ass, and she gripped the back of his neck with her free hand to draw him closer. He took the hint and started a hard rhythm, making her teeth clench with it, his mouth falling from her breast but haphazardly painting her with his tongue.</p><p>“Castle,” she gasped.</p><p>“You need to come.”</p><p>“So close,” she promised, her eyes squeezing shut with the furious burn of his cock inside her. He’d been half-erect when she’d touched him in tease, but it was obvious their morning fuck had done nothing to siphon his sexual energy.</p><p>Fuck, nothing could really siphon Castle. He was forever ready for her. </p><p>“You need to come,” he warned her again, growling fiercely into her breasts. His teeth nipped her skin and scraped her nipple and she cried out. His cock was bottoming out, so deep it ached, and she pushed a shaking hand between them, found her clit.</p><p>Kate touched herself, and Castle groaned at her breast, letting go to lean back and watch her. She caught his eyes with hers for a moment, and then his gaze cut to her fingers on her clit. With one arm banded around her back and holding her up, and her own hand gripping the sink, they could see the wet, thick place where they met.</p><p>“You are so beautiful,” he rasped. His hips were moving still, but his rhythm had slowed, strong and purposeful and deep, one thrust fast and then a slow slide out that was killing her. </p><p>“Rick,” she moaned, working her clit with her fingers. She was so wet it was hard to get that just-right angle, and soon his hand was nudging hers aside, his wide and thick fingers taking her place.</p><p>“I got you,” he called softly. “I got you, Kate. Brace yourself.”</p><p>She gasped and fell back, her shoulders against the mirror and her hands gripping the edge of the sink, and he rammed deep inside her.</p><p>Kate groaned at the invasion, split wide around his cock, and as he withdrew, his thumb pushed her clit against his shaft.</p><p>Her thighs were trembling, her knees pressed hard into his flanks, her body working to get closer, closer.</p><p>Castle pressed his fingers deep and hard against her clit, stemming the tide she felt coming for her. And then he slammed back inside her and she shattered apart.</p><p>Spectacularly, singularly, explosively.</p><p>She felt his climax bloom inside her, his arms catching her up against his chest as their hips were still grinding together, and she sank her teeth into the corded strength of his neck, sucking on his skin until her orgasm was done.</p><p>When it was over, he was holding her up in the middle of the bathroom, her legs wrapped around him, arms tight, his breath panting hard against her hair.</p><p>“Just once isn’t good enough,” he said gruffly.</p><p>“Never is,” she whispered back.</p><p>Castle carried her back to bed.</p><p>-----</p><p> </p><p>She was doing it on purpose, being sexy and alluring when he had to be at the Office and report to his father this morning. He was getting assigned to field work after his three month probation, and Kate knew that, but she had her hand around his cock and wouldn’t let go.</p><p>Once in bed, then he’d showered and tried to get dressed only to fuck her against the bathroom sink. And then once more in bed and now as he tried to pull on his pants, she was on her knees and caressing the back of his thighs with her palms.</p><p>“Kate,” he gritted.</p><p>“You know you need it,” she murmured, nuzzling her face against his cock. He groaned and sank down hard on the chair in her bedroom, even as she grinned at him. </p><p>“I need-”</p><p>“You’re still edgy. You’ve done six back to back before - with barely any time to recover - but I guess four will have to do this morning. Don’t really have time for more.”</p><p>“You’re either incredibly considerate, or seriously selfish.”</p><p>She laughed and bit her bottom lip, but her hand was cradling his cock again. He was already hard; he’d been hard the second she’d stopped him from buckling his belt and instead had begun to unzip him.</p><p>“Let’s go with both,” she suggested, “just for the sake of honesty.”</p><p>“Either way. You’re seriously incredible,” he murmured, stroking his fingers through her hair.</p><p>“Just doing my part. You know, patriotic and all.”</p><p>“Uh-huh,” he muttered. She wrapped her hand around his balls and started to play with them, her eyes on his face because she always knew the second he couldn’t stand it any longer. “I don’t think this is about me. More about you.”</p><p>“I won’t make you stain your pants, though,” she offered. “So there’s that.”</p><p>“Fuck.”</p><p>“And yeah, it makes me hot to bring my big, powerful spy to his knees. Or well, to the chair. When you come in my mouth, you always shout.”</p><p>“Fuck, Kate. Holy fuck.”</p><p>“And sometimes if I’m really good, you can’t help clutching my head. The feel of your fingers on my ears makes me think of your cock in my mouth and your come down my throat and-”</p><p>“Fuck. You have to stop,” he groaned. His hands were fisting on the arms of the chair and he really wanted to either have this done or grab her by the waist and rip aside her panties, sheath himself inside her.</p><p>“Stop talking or stop playing with your balls?”<br/>“Yes,” he gritted out.</p><p>Kate chuckled and lowered her head, swallowed him just like that.</p><p>He cursed and his hips surged because he couldn’t help it. Her hands clamped down on his thighs and shoved him back into the chair. “Sorry, sorry,” he gasped. “Fuck. Kate.”</p><p>She was swirling her tongue around him, sucking lightly on the head before going back down, down down down his shaft.</p><p>He gripped the back of her neck, trying to be good, to control himself, but she moaned and it made his cock shiver.</p><p>“Oh, fuck, Kate. Kate, you’re killing me. I can’t survive this, baby. Please. Please, sweetheart.”</p><p>She hummed and lifted her head, his cock now held just by the tip with her tongue and the edge of her teeth, and her fingers worked designs into his shaft. She swallowed him down again and he groaned, his head falling back, unable to keep watch.</p><p>Kate shifted to hook her thigh over his shin and he lifted his head, stared down at her while she sucked on his cock. He extended his leg and she moaned, riding his shin like it was at all doing it for her. </p><p>“Holy fuck, Kate.”</p><p>She moaned again and swallowed him down, so deep that he felt her throat. She grunted and gulped, her throat working, and he cried out at the feel of her, cupping her jaw in an effort to keep his hips still.</p><p>She swirled her tongue around him and he felt himself vibrating with it, so ready, ready now, and then she slid slowly up his shaft and sucked on his head.</p><p>He came hotly in her mouth, crying out her name, his hips jumping, his cock sliding along her lips, and she was swallowing him down, sucking it from him deeply.</p><p>He was sprawled in the chair, his pants still tangled around one of his feet, when Kate crawled up and sank into his lap, her arms around his neck.</p><p>Her mouth touched the skin at his collarbone in a feather-light kiss.</p><p>“Kiss for luck,” she whispered.</p><p>He could only manage to wrap a clumsy arm around her shoulders and hold her close to him, his eyes closed in the deepest bliss.</p><p>She was right. He’d been edgy but that had taken care of it.</p><p>-----</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I should talk to you about something,” he said finally, rousing. She was climbing off his lap but she was still in only that t-shirt, her legs going miles. </p><p>“You don’t have to,” she answered finally, watching him get dressed. </p><p>He got his boxer briefs back up, tucking himself inside; she’d fucking cleaned him off, and he liked still having that faintly damp feeling from her mouth.</p><p>“I don’t need to know mission details,” she said again. “Really. It’s fine.”</p><p>He winced. It wasn’t that. “No, it’s... something I’ve been doing on my own.” Her mother’s murder. He should have said something the second he realized the connection, but he couldn’t, in any universe, in any existence, find a way to say this without her completely shutting him out of her life.</p><p>For good.</p><p>“Like off-book?” She frowned and reached out, buttoned and zipped his pants, started threading the belt back through where she’d half pulled it out. “You’re on probation, baby. Do you think it’s a good idea to be doing something behind his back?”</p><p>Fuck, no. “I know. But I had to look into something.”</p><p>“So what does CIA punishment look like? Probation was being grounded in New York for three months. What would they do if they found out?”</p><p>He’d found four cases, four other cases, and he hadn’t told her. He had to tell her.</p><p>“Kate, it’s about-”</p><p>She pressed her fingers over his lips, shook her head. “Really, love. I don’t have to know. It’s sweet that you tell me things, but you’re already in trouble. Don’t make it worse.”</p><p>She softly kissed his cheek and then stepped past him, moving for the bedroom door. He hung his head and wiped a hand down his face, trying to muster the courage to fucking man up and tell her already.</p><p>Just tell her.</p><p>She was going to - she would hate him. She’d kick him out for touching it, for prying it open, and he still didn’t really have anything. He had four other cases with similar sloppy m.o. and the gut-sick certainty he’d seen it before.</p><p>“You want scrambled eggs and toast before you go?”</p><p>He lifted his head, blinking to clear that vision, to focus again on the bedroom before him. “You’re making eggs?” he called down the hall.</p><p>“Yeah, you want?”</p><p>“Thanks. That’d be great.”  She didn’t eat breakfast in the morning, not like this. He kept making stuff and she’d nibble at it but end up eating just toast. So if she was making scrambled eggs, she was making them for him.</p><p>He couldn’t tell her until he had something solid, until he’d found a way to talk to his father about this. </p><p>Shit, the pattern of the attacks, the attempt to strangle the victim, letting the victim escape - or think she’d escaped - only to shoot her in the back. Standing over her while she’d bled out, having the last thing she’d seen be the murderer’s face...</p><p>Fuck, he couldn’t tell her that. He couldn’t tell Kate that her mother’s killer was probably someone he had actually known. Served with. </p><p>He needed to know his father’s role in all this first. And his own. What had he done to make this happen? In 1999, he’d been out of the service and getting his balls handed to him by Colleen, but he’d re-upped after 9/11, and those guys had been there. He’d seen them with his own eyes.</p><p>He didn’t know; it was all tangled. He couldn’t tell her until he knew.</p><p>“Get dressed, Castle. You don’t want to be late.”</p><p>She was smirking at him, he could hear it in her voice.</p><p>He drew on a dress shirt but he left it unbuttoned, took his socks and tie and shoes into the living room with him. He found her in the kitchen, still in that skimpy t-shirt, no underwear because he’d felt her against his leg. She was beautiful, unkempt and frowning into the pan as she moved eggs around.</p><p>She was beautiful and he couldn’t lose her.</p><p>“Hey,” he said gruffly. </p><p>She turned and gave him a quick look, went back to the eggs with just that brief acknowledgement.</p><p>He sat down at the dining room table, a hand propping up his head, let himself watch her, memorize her. Her hair was in disarray around her shoulders, strands tucked behind her ears as she leaned in over the pan. She turned the heat down and added some salt, a splash of milk, went back to scrambling his eggs.</p><p>He couldn’t see her legs from here, but he knew how strong, how lithe and dangerous, how amazing they were. Her breasts were peaking the shirt, so he knew she was still buzzed from sex, or maybe just cold. She brought the pan off the burner and carefully ladled eggs onto a plate.</p><p>She came to him at the table with the plate and a fork, sank down into the chair cornered to his, drew a knee up. He could see straight to her sex, though when she caught him looking, she shifted and pulled the shirt down a little, evidently not trying to torture him.</p><p>“Thanks,” he said, lifting a bite of egg on his fork and putting it into his mouth, trying not to think of better tasting things he’d like his mouth on.</p><p>“So, if you get reinstated. Back to field work?”</p><p>He nodded, swallowing. “Active status again.”</p><p>“That means another assignment,” she said. Her fingers were fiddling with the edge of her shirt.</p><p>“Yeah, how it works.”</p><p>“Do you... know where? No, never mind. I don’t need to know where. Just - is it undercover again? Is that what you do all the time?”</p><p>“Deep cover, you mean?”</p><p>She nodded, lips pressed tightly together.</p><p>He frowned. “Well, I won’t get a deep cover assignment, not so soon. Which sucks - I’m made for deep cover.” Castle rubbed his jaw with the handle of the fork. “I’ll get posted to a station. Probably in Europe, since that’s what my father runs. His department, and he’ll want to keep me in his own house.”</p><p>“Keeps tabs on you,” she murmured.</p><p>“Yeah. Fuck, it’s going to be pretty damn boring.”</p><p>She rubbed her palm over the top of her thigh. “But... a station would be like what? Paris station? Berlin station?”</p><p>“Yeah, any of those. Probably not Paris. He’s going to want to fuck with me.”</p><p>“But not back to Turkey,” she said quietly.</p><p>“Turkey? No. That was my training run, my first deep cover. They can’t post me in Turkey; I’d be made, all the contacts I have, the assets, they’d be made as well.”</p><p>Kate let out a breath. “Good. That’s good.”</p><p>Castle stared at her a moment, but she wasn’t looking at him. She didn’t want him in Turkey. She - it hadn’t occurred to him that she might care where he was posted, that she’d have thought about this, worried over it.</p><p>Holy shit, Kate Beckett was... jealous? Of the woman he’d groomed to be an asset in Turkey. She was jealous.</p><p>“I’m hoping for Amsterdam,” he gave her. Her head came up but instead of acceptance, he saw a strange wash of hopelessness. “Amsterdam is a direct flight back.”</p><p>Kate blinked and sank back in the chair, staring at him. And then she abruptly got up and paced away from him, heading back into the kitchen like she’d forgotten something important. She flipped a dial on the stove, but he knew for a fact she’d already turned it off. He’d seen her do it.</p><p>“Amsterdam,” she said finally. “That’s... what’s the time difference?”</p><p>“It’s six hours ahead.”</p><p>“Oh.” She was leaning against the counter, not looking at him. “If you’re stationed there, is it out of an embassy?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Wouldn’t that be normal business hours?”</p><p>“Mostly.” Oh. Oh, fuck. That meant calling her would be difficult. “My lunch break can be your wake up call?” he suggested, standing up from the eggs to face her.</p><p>She looked lonely, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes on some far away spot. “Yeah,” she nodded. “Wake up call.”</p><p>Fuck, he was going to miss her. Badly. “It’s a direct flight,” he said again.</p><p>She flashed him a look, something like a smile but more like a grimace. “Just a flight away.”</p><p>A whole flight away.</p><p>“Not forever,” he promised. He couldn’t say not for long because he didn’t know. A year was a long time without her sleeping right beside him. These three months had spoiled him and he didn’t know what he was going to do.</p><p>“No,” she said quietly, her eyes slipping away from his. “It’s not forever.”</p><p>And he knew. He knew she didn’t mean the posting, she meant them.</p><p>He wanted her to take it back. He wanted her to say they were for always, forever, but he couldn’t get the words past his lips.</p><p>Instead he came to her at the counter and caught her face in his hands, kissed the downward curve of her mouth until she opened for him. He stroked his tongue inside, easy, slow, lazy, telling himself it wasn’t the last time he’d make love to her.</p><p>He skimmed his hand over the curve of her ass, rucked up the shirt with his fingers. She moaned and twined her arms around his neck, pressed herself into him even as he teased between her legs.</p><p>“Once more, once more,” she begged, nipping his tongue, his bottom lip, sucking on his kiss. “Once more before-”</p><p>“And a thousand more after that,” he growled. “A million. Unending.”</p><p>“How about you see if you can do this one, and we’ll let tomorrow worry about your millions.”</p><p>-----</p><p>Castle wouldn’t let himself rub his palms on his dress pants, wouldn’t let himself show weakness. He stood at attention outside his father’s office, the secretary busy at her computer and not looking at him.</p><p>But she was probably recording his every movement for his father’s scrutiny. Black was like that.</p><p>The secretary’s hands-free headset lit up blue on the earpiece and she murmured an answer into the mic. Her eyes came to his and she indicated the door with a slight nod; that was his only notice. He headed for the door and opened it himself, saw his father sitting at his desk.</p><p>He came inside and stood just before the lone chair, resting his hands on the back. Black was signing off on paperwork or something equally ridiculous; he even had reading glasses on. Black didn’t need glasses; he’d never needed them.</p><p>All a ruse, part of his stupid psychological tricks, making him wait, showing him who was boss. Castle hadn’t realized just how much his father bent people to do his will. Even Eastman had hinted about it for years now, but Castle had the blinders of a son. </p><p>Beckett had said a few things, but she’d stopped talking when he hadn’t seemed comfortable talking about it. </p><p>“Richard.”</p><p>He held back a sigh. “Yes, sir.”</p><p>“Three months probation is up?”</p><p>Like that was really a question. “Yes, sir, it is.”</p><p>“Sit, Richard.”</p><p>Finally given permission, Castle came around the chair and sat down, pulling at the material of his pant legs at his knees to give him room. He sat back easily, composed his face.</p><p>Maybe the composure would be too much of a tell. Shit. There was no good way to deal with his father. </p><p>“Do you have a job for me?” he said, letting some of his eagerness out. There was nothing his father liked better than a willingness to do the job. Always according to his rules, but Castle had managed to find his own space within those rules, hadn’t he?</p><p>Had he?</p><p>“I’ve got a new assignment,” his father said slowly. “You do realize that Ireland can never happen again.”</p><p>“I’m cursed when it comes to that place,” he tried, giving his father a lopsided smile. He’d always been too irreverent for his father’s taste, but he could work it to his advantage today.</p><p>“Perhaps,” Black said, flicking a finger over a file as if he found that distasteful.</p><p>“So. What is it? Lay it on me. I’m ready. Passed all my training, requalified, did the program. I’m good to go.”</p><p>“Richard, this is serious. This isn’t a joke.”</p><p>“I know,” he said quickly. He kept his hands still on his knees but he gave his father a brief nod.</p><p>“Have you gotten it all out?” his father said then. “Whatever this... sidetrack was? You’ve worked it out of your system.”</p><p>Castle’s lips twitched. “Yes, sir.”<br/>He meant Beckett. How closely had Black been watching?</p><p>“You look better,” Black said finally, eyes narrowed on him. “You look at lot better than you have all year. I’d say you’ve figured yourself out.”</p><p>He had, hadn’t he? He knew what he wanted.</p><p>“That’s good,” Black said briskly. “Very good. Since you’ll be on assignment in Tunisia. I have a special installation in Tunis, the capital city, which will be your contact if you need it. But this one is deep cover. We have a guerilla army forming-”</p><p>“Deep cover,” Castle echoed, staring at his father. “But you always said I wasn’t the right fit for a mission in Africa.”</p><p>It was insanely difficult for a Caucasian to go deep undercover in an African country. After Ireland, Castle had never expected a job quite so significant. </p><p>“You have not been, previously.”</p><p>“What’s changed?”</p><p>“Your tests recently. I have seen a marked improvement in your critical thinking and analytical skills, as well as your ability to make the hard decision.”</p><p>He was more ruthless, that’s what his father meant. “I’ve been angling for that job in Cairo for years,” he rasped. “Years.”</p><p>“I know it’s not Cairo,” his father said quietly. “But it will get you there. You wanted away from my department, I know. Don’t you think I get it? You want to make your own name. Hell, you’ve already made your own name. Agent Castle.”</p><p>He stiffened, glanced to his father. But Black was shaking his head as if ruefully, as if he didn’t mind.</p><p>“Yes, sir,” he replied finally. “Make my own name.”</p><p>“This gives you that chance. Tunisia is as close as I can keep you, and as far away.”</p><p>“Tunisia,” he repeated.</p><p>“They have an association agreement with the European Union,” his father said. “The CIA has an interest in keeping their government stable, of course.”</p><p>“Of course,” he said hollowly.</p><p>“I’ll send mission details to your station. Have you a secure laptop? I’d prefer if you try one of the smaller ones; the less equipment you have, the better.”</p><p>“I’ll get one from Tech.”</p><p>“Good.” His father smiled thinly at him and stood up, holding out a hand, indicating their time was up. </p><p>Castle stood and took the hand, shook mechanically. His mind was blank.</p><p>“You look good, son. I’m glad to see it. This will be a feather in your cap.”</p><p>Tunisia.</p><p>Castle left the office woodenly, forgetting to shut the door behind him.</p><p>-----</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She opened the door for him before he could get the key in the lock and she took one look at his face and stepped back.</p><p>He came inside, blinked, his hands opening and closing but no words coming to him.</p><p>“How bad?” she rasped. “What - what are they going to do to you?”</p><p>Castle lifted his eyes and caught her gaze and it burned through him like dawn through the fog. The dog had come down the hallway to investigate the open door, nudged a nose into the back of Castle’s hand.</p><p>He glanced to Cujo and cupped the side of the dog’s muzzle, rubbed at his ear. “I - not - it’s not bad.”</p><p>“No?” she breathed.</p><p>He lifted his eyes again, blinked. “He gave me - one of the best assignments available.”</p><p>Kate sank back on her heels and he realized she’d been up on her toes for some reason, her hands clenched together. “Oh?”</p><p>“Yeah. I’ve been... angling for a job like this for years,” he muttered. He rubbed a hand through his hair and tugged, his chest hollowed out.</p><p>“Years.” </p><p>Castle slid past her, moved to slink down into the couch, staring at nothing. “I’ve been assigned to Tunisia, near the capital.”</p><p>“Tunisia, Africa?” </p><p>He glanced up sharply, turned his head to see her standing, struck, still in the entry. She hastily rearranged her features, closed her eyes for a moment before coming to sit in the armchair across from him. She perched on the edge, her hands pressed between her knees.</p><p>“I’ve been begging him for Cairo,” he murmured. “Begging. I thought he’d hold out on me just because he could.”</p><p>“Africa,” she said. “Don’t those embassies get - bombed a lot? Are you security or something? That - that could be... good?”</p><p>“No,” he frowned. “Not an embassy. That’s what I’m saying. Shit. Beckett, I’ve seen this undercover assignment on the roster for the last six weeks, but I never thought he’d give it to me. I never in a million years would’ve thought.”</p><p>“A million years,” she echoed.</p><p>Castle shook his head, rubbed a hand down his face, tried to smile at her. </p><p>She rallied, smiling widely. “Hey, it’s only five hours ahead there, I think. So won’t be as bad, right?” </p><p> </p><p>“Ri-right,” he stuttered, then frowned. “Well. No, I - Kate. It’s a deep cover assignment.”</p><p>Her face blanched, and his heart flipped. Kate lifted her hands and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, shoulders hunched, and then she jerked to her feet, moving quickly away.</p><p>“Kate?”</p><p>“I heard you,” she rasped. “Deep cover. I heard you.”</p><p>His chest tightened and he got to his feet, following after her, trying to catch her. She was heading for the bedroom, the dog trotting after her, whining. Cujo had seen something Castle hadn’t then.</p><p>“Kate?”</p><p>“I heard you,” she said again, but this time her voice was shaky.</p><p>He had left her once when she’d done this, walked away from him and shut the door in his face, and it had been the worst mistake of his life. He pushed past the half-closed door now and reached out for her arm, spun her around to his face him.</p><p>She yanked out of his grip and kept away, moving to her closet with a sweater she’d left on the bed, some mindless task, not looking at him.</p><p>“Kate, look at me.”</p><p>“I don’t - think that’s a good idea,” she said, her face half-turned to him, angling away. She had a crooked smile that he could see, but he didn’t like it. And then she shoved past him and back out the door, the sweater swinging from its hanger, and she was through the bathroom and closing the door on him.</p><p>He waited a moment, his heart tripling its beat, his blood rushing in his ears. He glanced down at the dog, saw Cujo settling in to stand guard, laid out on the floor before the door.</p><p>“Kate?”</p><p>“I’m using the bathroom, Castle.”</p><p>Like hell she was. To hide out maybe. He reached for the door knob and heard her grunt, felt her trying to catch the knob - she’d forgotten to lock it. He pushed it open and came through and she was swiping her hand under her eye, her face averted.</p><p>“Kate.”</p><p>“Stop.”</p><p>“Kate, what’s-”</p><p>“Don’t. Don’t do that.”</p><p>“What’s wrong?”</p><p>She swiveled to give him a bitter look, shook her head. “If you have to ask... nothing. Nothing is wrong. Still only a flight away, Richard.”</p><p>Still only...</p><p>He reached out and cupped the side of her face, but she yanked her head out of his grip, backtracked to avoid him.</p><p>He shifted into the doorway to keep her from escaping, his hands hanging at his sides. “Ah, about that flight away thing. I won’t - won’t be able to come home.”</p><p>“To my home, you mean?”</p><p>He flinched and looked away, frowning at the doorframe. “Correct. I won’t be able to leave. Not an assignment like this.”</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>He glanced back at her, but she had set her jaw, was very determinedly looking straight at him. “Kate.”</p><p>“So it’s not a boring embassy job. Congratulations, Richard.” She moved to go past him, unfolding her arms, but he caught her elbow, held her against him.</p><p>“Kate, why are you mad at me?”</p><p>“I’m not,” she bit out.</p><p>“You are.”</p><p>She jerked away from him, lifted scalding eyes to his. “I’m not. You’re only who you are. I’m pissed with me.”</p><p>And then she stalked out of the bathroom.</p><p>-----</p><p>No.</p><p>No.</p><p>He chased after her, his heart flayed. You’re only who you are. He found her in the hallway, moving quickly, and he grabbed her arm only to have her wrench out of his grip, shove him back.</p><p>“Don’t,” she warned.</p><p>A year. A year. A year without her. “I don’t know what to say here.”</p><p>She gritted her teeth. “You’ve said enough.”</p><p>“No, no, I haven’t. I have’t at all. You never give me the chance to say-”</p><p>“Rick. Just - stop. I’ve got errands to run before I have to be at work tomorrow.”</p><p>“No. No, this isn’t over.”</p><p>Her eyes went matte black, flat and lightless. “But it is.” </p><p>She turned away from him and this time he didn’t let her pull away; he gripped her hard and pushed her against the wall, pressed his hips to hers to pin her. She struggled, hooked a leg around his, yanked, but he was more experienced. He could subdue her at will.</p><p>She made a noise that cut him to the quick, her eyes closing, but he ignored it, pushed it down, kept her there.</p><p>“Stop, Beckett. Stop. You can have some fucking expectations. Be mad with me. Not with yourself for thinking things, planning things. I want to plan with you. I want-”</p><p>“No,” she shouted, eyes opening wide. She bucked her hips and tried to lunge away from him, but he kept her trapped, pinned, completely at his mercy. “No. There are no plans. This is something we do and now it’s over. You’re gone for a year. If you’re - if it’s still - shit happens, and a year is probably nothing to you, but my whole life changed in the space of a night.”</p><p>“Mine too,” he whispered, and then he touched his mouth to hers.</p><p>Kate mewled and shoved him, not accepting it, twisting her head away, but he felt her cheek brush his and the tears there that slipped free. His heart broke, he was killing her, but he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and tried to make her stay, make her stay.</p><p>“My life changed the night I saw you at the bar,” he murmured. “And Kate I can’t - I can’t spend a year away from you.”</p><p>“Stop,” she moaned. Her fist came up and caught his jaw before he saw it; his head snapped back and he stared at her, stunned for an instant too long. She ran, taking off down the hallway, and he heard her grabbing for her keys.</p><p>“Kate!” </p><p>He came after her, his jaw aching - fuck, she was getting better at the self-defense - and he put his back to the front door to block her. She made that noise again, that wounded animal noise, and he reached out for her, but she skittered back, her keys in her hand, shoes shoved on her feet.</p><p>“Kate, I can’t do a year without you.”</p><p>“I’m not fucking waiting for you like some damn army wife while you fuck your assets and work your contacts and maybe you make it out alive or maybe you fucking don’t, but I’ll never know.”</p><p>She was furious, God, so furious, and beautiful in that righteous and wounded way, and he reached for her again like a complete fool.</p><p>She batted his hand away, twisted his wrist, nearly broke his elbow with a move he’d taught her. But it forced him away from the door and she was yanking it open.</p><p>He slammed it back, wincing when he saw the edge catch her hip as it did. He caught her wrists in one hand and dragged her against him, dangerous move, giving her access to sensitive parts, but she didn’t go for the ruthless maim.</p><p>“Kate. I won’t go.”</p><p>“What?” she hissed. She went absolutely still. “No. You can’t do that.”</p><p>“Well, fuck, that wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, Beckett.”</p><p>“It wasn’t? Why the hell not? It’s your job, it’s what you’ve been working at for years.”</p><p>“Don’t sound so snarky.”</p><p>She jerked out of his grip and stepped back, her hands on her hips. But the fight had left her eyes. “It’s not snark. It’s the truth. If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t turn it down. The promotion I was working for? Why are you doing this?”</p><p>“Because I’m not interested in a year without even talking to you.”</p><p>She closed her mouth, but she turned her head so that he couldn’t see what she was thinking. Well, he never could see what she was thinking.</p><p>“Kate?”</p><p>“Don’t do that for me. I wouldn’t do it for you.”</p><p>And then she pushed right past him and out the door, running, escaping.</p><p>He didn’t go after her.</p><p>-----</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Beckett allowed herself to sob in Central Park, running the pavement pathways through the trees with tears streaming down her face, her breathing choked by graceless weeping.</p><p>And then she was done.</p><p>It was done.</p><p>She swiped her eyes on her shirt, her body steamed with sweat, her feet pulsing with blisters from running in her shoes without socks. She’d been dressed for a run before he’d gotten home - to her place - and now she’d had her run.</p><p>She paced the length of the entry at 72nd, idly watching the kids on the playground, hearing their screeches and screams, hearing her own heart pounding in her head. She dried her sweat-slicked cheek off on the shoulder of her shirt, tried to cool down.</p><p>She walked back the long way to her building, but taking more time wouldn’t put off the conversation she needed to have, the final good-bye, and so she found herself walking faster just to punish herself.</p><p>She was good at that.</p><p>She’d known better. She had known not to get involved with him, but fuck, she didn’t see where or how she could take it back. She would just - learn to live with it and move on.</p><p>What didn’t kill you made you stronger. And a year from now if he-</p><p>No.</p><p>Best not to pin herself on a year from now. She couldn’t make promises; she didn’t know what life looked like. She had her mother’s case still an open wound in her fucked up life, and it was true what she’d told him.</p><p>She’d never choose him over making detective.</p><p>He didn’t deserve that. Fuck, she didn’t deserve that either. He couldn’t put that on her. She wasn’t able to handle that; she’d told him time and again to fucking be cool, but he just couldn’t seem to do anything by halves. He fucking plunged right in, dragging her down with him, drowning them both.</p><p>She couldn’t find it in herself to wish it away, to want him gone. Fuck. If he was still at her apartment when she got back, she knew she would jump him. She’d ride him hard all night, make it something to remember, one last-</p><p>She wouldn’t keep it from herself; she couldn’t. He was damn right on that one - she didn’t want to do a year without him.</p><p>But she would. She’d do a year and then another one and then another and if she was still alive, if the work she did hadn’t killed her yet, she’d do another year and another.</p><p>She’d make detective and she would solve her mother’s case. That was the trajectory of her life, and thank God, fucking Agent Castle hadn’t set her back. </p><p>Kate jogged up the flight of steps in her building, sweat sticking to her and her feet throbbing, but determined to have it out with him. It was good, it was, but it’s over now. Let me give you a damn good send-off, baby. </p><p>When she opened her apartment door, the place was dark.</p><p>Cujo came in from the bedroom, his tail swishing softly, and she knew.</p><p>Castle wasn’t here.</p><p>He’d left already.</p><p>Well, she had made it clear, hadn’t she?</p><p>-----</p><p>-----</p><p>Castle spread the contents of the file out on the conference room table, photo by photo, point by point. His jaw was taut as a wire and ached, but there’d be time for that later.</p><p>“Richard?”</p><p>He straightened up and saw his father in the doorway, frowning. “Please come in.”</p><p>“My secretary said you wanted to meet me.” Black flipped his wrist to look at the time, elaborately, and frowned. “Make this quick.”</p><p>“I have a new assignment,” Castle said quietly.</p><p>“Assignment for what?”</p><p>“My assignment. I’m not going to Tunisia.”</p><p>“Excuse me?” Black took a step forward, but his eyes caught the carnage on the photos splayed over the desk and he paused. “What is this? What is the meaning of this?”</p><p>“You know what this is,” he said. “This is an Afghani village where my test unit slaughtered-”</p><p>“Shut your damn mouth,” Black snarled, stepping in close and flipped the photos over with a violence Castle had never seen before. “That is classified and this is an unsecure room.”</p><p>“Which is why I’m coming to you here, now,” Castle said. He tugged the photos out from under his father’s fingers. “Rather than going through normal procedure. I’ve found a similar crime scene.”</p><p>“It’s not a crime scene.”</p><p>Castle slanted him a look. “Maybe it’s casualties of war. But this is a crime scene,” he said, and tapped the photo of Johanna Beckett’s gruesome murder. “And this.” He added the next case to it, the man Scott Cavanaugh. “And this. And this. And this. Five cases.”</p><p>Black stared down at the photos covering the conference room table. “What are you getting at?”</p><p>“It’s the same exact method of operation. It’s the garrote the sergeant-at-arms taught us to use in black ops training on my elite team. The team you injected with-”</p><p>“I told you to be careful of your words,” Black said, his voice ice cold. “There are ears everywhere.”</p><p>“And I’m telling you that your program did this. Your pets. Those men I trained with, they did this. After we were discharged in ’98, they did this.”</p><p>“You don’t know that.”</p><p>“You can’t tell me it’s not the same,” he said. He kept his voice even; it wasn’t even trouble to keep himself under control because he had this. It was nailed up tight. He flipped over the Afghan photos and stabbed his finger on the image of the woman - half-strangled before she’d been shot in the back, multiple times. “This is the same. It is exactly the same. And this happened after 9/11. They re-enlisted, just like I did, and I was there when they did this.”<br/>“Well, you were supposed to keep them handled, Richard. You didn’t do a very good job of it, did you?”</p><p>He didn’t react. “And now it looks like they’re doing jobs in New York. Or were. You need me on this, Black. You need me right here in this city, investigating this quietly, before someone gets wind of the additional training you gave our unit. I know you had them on the regimen; I know you injected them. And it broke something in them. Don’t you want to minimize the damage before someone else finds out?”</p><p>Black shifted his eyes to Castle’s. “Someone? Who might that be? Your fuck buddy? Is this what has Officer Beckett so unstable?”</p><p>Castle bit his tongue, literally, scraped his fingernail into the soft pad of his thumb to keep from responding to that. “Beckett will find this. You don’t know how fucking capable she is. But if I can work this first, if I get to it first, I can keep the program out of it.”</p><p>Black’s nostrils flared. Castle knew he didn’t like being backed into corner, but this was all he had left, all he had available.</p><p>God help him if his father turned on Beckett. Holy-</p><p>“You give me six months to work on this. Call it sabbatical, call it New York Operations, whatever you like,” he said quietly. “Give me that time and I find out if the unit is still working, if someone went fucking AWOL, what. I’ll stay on top of this and I’ll cover both our asses. Because this needs to be dealt with. We cannot have someone from an experimental unit out there murdering people like a serial killer. That shows up. That leaves a fucking trace a mile wide. If I found it, someone else will find it.”</p><p>Black rubbed his jaw, glanced once more to the photos. He dropped his hand and stepped back, gesturing towards the table. “Fine, six months in New York. But you’ll do runs, a handful of days at a time, my right hand man. You’ll do the more - difficult jobs.”</p><p>Assassinations. Castle gritted his teeth, but it was the best he would get. “I’ll do my job, sir.” </p><p>“Then get rid of this. Burn it. No one can see this.”</p><p>And then Black left the conference room.</p><p>Castle had six months more, and a plausible excuse for Kate - he was going to be his father’s fucking tool.</p><p>-----</p><p>When Castle pushed they key into the lock, he half expected to find it wouldn’t work. But it did, and he opened the door quietly, faintly ashamed but determined too.</p><p>He didn’t know how to tell her, but she needed to know he wasn’t going under. </p><p>The lights were off and he saw Cujo lying on the floor behind the couch. His tail swished but he didn’t get up to greet Castle, so Castle toed off his shoes and laid his keys on the hall table softly.</p><p>He tread the floorboards into the living room until he saw Beckett asleep on the couch, her body curled up in the fetal position, face half-hidden in her folded arms. He came around the couch and sank down onto the cushion at her hip, reached out to stroke the hair off her face.</p><p>She didn’t wake. It was nearly midnight; she looked like she’d been running, still had her running clothes on. He caressed the hair behind her ear, felt it sweat-dried with salt, felt the too-warm burn of her skin. </p><p>His father knew her. Knew all about her, knew he’d been here, seeing her. And the price was being his father’s hit squad, his father’s enforcer.</p><p>Kate shifted and her eyes opened suddenly in the darkness, her body tensing.</p><p>“It’s just me,” he murmured.</p><p>She pushed her head away from him, rolled to look up, confusion skirting her eyes. “Why are you here?”</p><p>“Where else would I be?” he sighed. His fingers curled in her hair, cupped the back of her neck. “I talked to my father. I - I said some things. I’ve been put on his team, his - uh - short trips, really, to put out fires. I’m the guy he calls in when he doesn’t like the way an operation is going.”</p><p>She jerked upright, clutching his arm. “What?” she scraped out.</p><p>“He didn’t seem pleased with me, but - I can’t help feeling I played into his hand.” Castle wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t exactly telling her the whole truth, how he had effectively blackmailed his father. “I’m assigned to the New York field office for the next six months.”</p><p>“Six months. What did you say to him?” she husked. </p><p>“You don’t need to know.”</p><p>“It was about me,” she said, pressing a hand over her eyes, drawing her knees up. “Castle. Damn it.”</p><p>“It wasn’t entirely about you,” he hedged. “Some of it was about me. Some of it was... his goal for me. What he wants me to do, to be. But I can’t be that anymore.”</p><p>She looked up at him, her eyes bleak in the darkness. “Castle, this isn’t a good idea. We shouldn’t-”</p><p>“Don’t,” he rasped, clutching her raised knees, dragging himself closer on the couch. “Don’t say that.”</p><p>“It’s just not tenable. We’re not-”</p><p>“We are. It is. Don’t say that,” he growled. “I want you.”</p><p>She closed her eyes.</p><p>“Kate. Kate, don’t you want me too?”</p><p>She buried her face in her knees but his hands were right there, wrapped around her, and he could feel the tears against the backs of his fingers. </p><p>“Kate,” he whispered. “Please. Please don’t kick me out. I can’t go out there without having you. Can’t I just have you?”</p><p>She lifted her head and didn’t even try to hide the tears on her cheeks. She shook her head and scraped a hand through her hair. “Fuck, you can’t even try to be cool, can you?”</p><p>Something in his chest loosened and he could breathe again. “No. No, I really can’t. Not with you. I’m trying, I’m trying, but you gotta have mercy on me, Kate, because it’s bad enough to be at my father’s whim, his beck and call, but I can’t do this if I can’t have you.”</p><p>“No one has me,” she rasped, blinking and not looking at him.</p><p>“No, baby. Course not. No one has you. But me.”</p><p>She shifted her gaze to him and huffed a breath, but he didn’t care. She lifted her hand and touched the side of his jaw. “Why do you want me? I punched you. Does it hurt?”</p><p>“Of course I want you,” he whispered. “It hurts but it’ll heal. It’s worth it.”</p><p>She leaned into him, her forehead to his, her body curled up between them, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, his panicky heart slowing down.</p><p>She pressed her mouth to his jaw, right at the bruise, and he could feel it hot and swollen as the blood was already working to heal him. Her fingers ran through his hair and curled at his ear.</p><p>“Is it really worth it?” she murmured.</p><p>She was worth it. Even assignment on his father’s death squad. Even assassination ops. She was worth it.</p><p>He hugged her tighter and drew her into his lap, wouldn’t let her stay away, and he claimed her mouth with his like he’d wanted to before.<br/>She didn’t punch him this time, but she didn’t surrender. She surged up into his kiss and pushed back, tongue and teeth, knee sliding over his lap to straddle him, leaning him back on the couch.</p><p>He got his hand under the waistband of her running capris and between her legs, but she wasn’t wet for him at all. </p><p>Castle jerked his head back to look at her, but she thrust her hips against his hand and the friction seemed to wake her sex, pouring hot, thick arousal over his fingers.</p><p>He moaned and rose up for her kiss again, forgetting how she’d been closed to him for that brief split second, letting himself forget.</p><p>He had six months, they had six months.</p><p>-----</p>
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